A correctional facility is a facility in which inmates are confined and many of their freedoms restricted. Typically, a government institution confines inmates to correctional facilities for a specified period of time after the inmates have been found guilty of committing a crime.
Correctional facilities in the United States and in other areas abroad are often either overcrowded with inmates or understaffed with guards due to cost constraints. A more succinct way of characterizing the correctional facility situation in the United States and in other areas abroad is that the ratio of inmates to guards in many correctional facilities is often too high. As a result, guards are unable to appropriately monitor inmate activity and respond to events requiring their attention, which endangers not only the guards and inmates at these correctional facilities, but also the general public as well. Also, a substantial amount of the total funds available to correctional facilities is spent on guards, leaving little money left over to pay for programs to reduce recidivism, which only further exacerbates the problem of inmate overcrowding.
In addition, even assuming additional funds are made available to correctional facilities to increase the number of guards to perform inmate monitoring, studies have shown that humans are often ill-suited to perform routine monitoring through surveillance equipment, such as video cameras. This is because of the rote nature of monitoring surveillance equipment for some event of interest that may only infrequently occur.
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